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The Selfish Self
The Selfish Self I am my world – A world apart. Apart from me there is nothing. The world is mine. It arises from the uniqueness of my life. My life is the world and the world Is how things stand. And how things stand is my life – And only my life. What counts is me. I number myself: A one wrapped inside a zero. I stand alone, a single bulb Lighting the whole room, Enclosed by walls that are my sphere. I have no doors or windows. No

Richard Mather


A Ghost As If
A Ghost As If I am not your keeper O ghost who crouches At the grave of my father. The body is dead; it is in the shade. A pale figure with a sheet for a robe rises from the earth (His hair black as ravens' feet). With cold-clay fingers, He could quell the soul’s fire. As if. A seagull cries In the salted air Like a baby Calling for its parents. There is blood on the land, Blood in the rivers too. You are not what you appear To thi

Richard Mather


The Soul Moves
The Soul Moves The soul moves & by small degrees Of slow calculation Actuates the two substances That are body & mind. First operation is the entry of light Into dark, of dead limbs Galvanized by the sun’s power; The second is of vast dreams cut short By a harsh & loud noise, Like a fire alarm at the cinema – Enfolded in stillful bliss no longer, Soul, body and mind sit up blinking, Grudgingly resurrected – Otherwise known as waking up.

Richard Mather


Leibniz’s Soul
Leibniz’s Soul What is amazing is not that my corpse was contracted and compressed into the earth’s dark matter (while my grave went unmarked and unremarked for some fifty years) but that my soul, of magnitude so tiny it was nothing more than a vibrating point, escaped its prison and went its own way. No longer confined, the vibrating point was free to enter into compounds with unseen bodies of atomic size and together they let so much light pass through that they were barely

Richard Mather


Saul
Saul The soul of the king an out-of-tune lyre with harpstrings for guts – many sharps and flats. Sent by the LORD the holy pneuma's hand scrapes unholy noise. It maddens the king with dissonant thought – the fatal vibration of blood in the heart until he is dead.

Richard Mather
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